On its face, Pig is pulp entertainment. Rob (Cage) lives as a hermit deep in the woods. He and his pet russet-colored Kunekune pig forage for prized truffles from the riverside soil. Every Thursday, an obnoxious, image-obsessed buyer, Amir (Alex Wolff), comes to make an exchange: supplies for truffles. One night, assailants break into the cabin and drag away the pig. Rob, beaten and bloodied — as he will remain for the rest of the film, with new coats of blood from fresh beatings caked on — leaves the woods to find his pig. He enlists Amir for a ride and Rob shakes down his contacts in nearby Portland, Oregon. We come to learn, slowly, that Rob’s is a name that rings out in the city. He was a renowned chef, an artist and innovator who had a mental break. He’s been in self-imposed exile for some 15 years.

What’s fascinating about Pig is how the film embeds its musings and thematic interests within a plot with a fair share of absurd, stylized characteristics, clearly modeled on pop revenge thrillers. In particular, Pig is an obvious product of the post-John Wick era, where the influence of graphic novels and video games — with nested missions and bosses and levels and secret stratagems — is pronounced. It even ups the ante by substituting a more amusing house pet. Pig follows the contours of the tried-and-true plot of a seasoned professional forced out of retirement, and it leans on the man-as-meme reputation of its star. In its prestige take on this subgenre, Pig resembles something like Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin (2013), but crossed with Ratatouille (2007). Up until it’s final showdown, it continually threatens to become a more lurid exercise, baiting the audience to expect a guignol, but it undercuts its own exploitation fetish at each turn. It functions, more than anything else, as a referendum on audience anticipation, namely, the internet-fueled desire for a manic, scenery-chewing Nicolas Cage-helmed bloodbath. 

The sequencing of the film, the way it builds, feeds this sense of impending conflict. Typical revenge plots follow a pattern and Pig sticks to that template: the inciting incident that’s an act of violation, the pacifist forced into action, the investigation, episodic confrontations of increasing urgency and intensity, and working up the food chain to a kingpin at the end of the maze. The film consistently gestures towards a waning strain of autumnal revenge thrillers with an aging, grizzled man of action at the center, a subgenre that boomed in the wake of Taken‘s (2008) surprise popularity and slowly shifted to saturate VOD purgatory. 

Cage’s volatility threatens to upend each scene and each exchange. Cage only barks once in Pig, when he steals a bike off a random porch and lashes out at a passerby. He stalks his way through the city, walking down the middle of the street like a man with a death wish, with nothing left to lose; like in many of Cage’s great roles, the rules and boundaries of society are immaterial. It’s a ridiculous sight, this crazed celebrity — a man we know for ripping out his own teeth, giving the most insane reading of the alphabet, punching a woman in a bear suit, and collecting dinosaur skulls — blithely sauntering through neighborhoods. And Rob’s brutalized appearance is a constant reminder of the damage and pain that has been inflicted on him, for which, we assume, someone must be held accountable. 

Cage brings the baggage of his career and persona here, but he underplays it. His default mode is silence, seething but never striking. His character is defined by restraint. Rob is a contradiction. He’s plagued by apocalyptic visions — shades of misbegotten movies like Knowing and Left Behind baked in — of an impending earthquake and tidal wave overdue to flatten the city. He’s made a clean break from society but, improbably, has carved out a comfortable, serene existence. Rob begins the movie like a fairytale character. Alone, deep in the woods, with a pig as a companion, foraging; his monastic routine strips his activities down to essentials. The obsidian water, moss, diffuse light through the trees and underbrush is pristine and idyllic. He does not read as a broken or fallen man. He’s in perfect harmony with the deep forest, plunging his hands in the water and his knife in the ground to tap into the natural resources around him. After his pig is stolen, he is potential energy personified. His damage and his fatalism is kept in check, only coming out in a striking, vulnerable monologue in Amir’s studio apartment well into their journey.

The threat of violence is a constant throughout Pig. It’s especially evident in the early scenes in Portland, where Rob first checks in with an old cohort, Edgar (Darius Pierce), another man of repute who runs a particular corner of the ill-defined culinary underworld. Specifically, he runs a strange, literally underground fight club in “Hotel Portland,” where people in the food service industry submit themselves for a brutal beating that they must withstand for a set duration. In this surreal excursion, Rob leads Amir into the bowels of the city, down into the ruins upon which modern Portland is built. Rob scrawls his name on the board to participate in this bloodsport to ply information from Edgar. The scene functions as an arrival: the awe-inspiring return of Robin Feld. In this scene, Cage, who stands all of 6 feet tall, is at his most hulking, filmed from low angles to accentuate his frame and presence. A diminutive guy in a uniform beats him to a pulp, leaving him swollen and laboring to move and speak.

Rob is bloodstained the entire film. It makes him look perpetually unhinged. It also makes him stand out, always drawing attention to Cage as a feral presence in civilization. But it garners sympathy for the character, too; he wears his pain — both his current and long-term trauma – all over his face and body and it can’t be ignored. He endures it like penance. The absurdity of his appearance across the various episodes is simultaneously amusing and tragic. It’s played as a sight gag — “Do you need medical attention?” asks the chef at the haute restaurant, where he looks like a disturbed vagrant — but it also represents his single-minded focus, his alienation bordering on madness.

Pig is a Trojan horse. The implication, including in the trailer and the movie’s poster, a rageful close-up of Cage in profile, bathed in darkness, is that he goes about his mission to find the pig through violence. This expectation persists until the final confrontation. The stakes of the missing pig and the thirst for retribution hangs over each interaction. What the movie interrogates, even incidentally, is the expectation of cheap thrills. What type of satisfaction do we want in this scenario? What form of reckoning is justified? And how savage should it be? We get the over-the-top pulp world-building — with secret fraternities, underground professional networks, mythic figures spoken about in hushed tones, and specialists who are unrivaled masters of their trade — but we also witness a sensitive mood piece about a troubled man who is forced to reconcile his past decisions and reconnect with a society he had no intention to ever return to. On a second viewing, knowing who Rob is grounds the interactions and confrontations, making them feel more low-key and sad, even as the framing is more blatantly artificial; the character snaps into focus, clarifying moments like his concerned gaze up at the Broadway Bridge on their bleary trip into the city.

The film is effectively a series of anti-confrontations. After visiting Amir’s main contact, Mac (Gretchen Corbett), they track down the “junkies,” the hired bottom-feeders who actually took the pig, almost immediately. But Rob hangs back as Mac questions them, barely looking at or interacting with the people who violated his cabin and beat him. The pig is the mission, not vengeance. Later, Rob’s faceoff with a tightly wound chef at a successful, trend-chasing restaurant — “what’s the… concept?” Rob asks witheringly — is laced with a whiff of menace. But this tense confrontation turns into a pitying exchange, an acknowledgement that the chef, Derek Finway (David Knell), a former wash out from Rob’s restaurant way back when, has compromised his ambitions, that he sold out for acclaim. This interaction shifts into an empathetic, sage talk about the chef’s abandoned dreams. From there, Rob gets the information he needs to confront the kingpin, Darius (Adam Arkin), Amir’s father, who runs the culinary black market in the city and the surrounding area. “He’s not somebody you want to make angry,” we’re told. The first meeting with Darius is subdued. He’s threatening but controlled. He offers Rob a payoff, which he rejects outright, but the interaction never boils over.

They end in a stalemate and Rob leaves. His final act, the showdown with the villain, turns into an act of compassion. Rob and Amir cook a gourmet meal with ingredients collected from Rob’s old network of contacts — apart from the black market dealings that have taken over. This endgame is an unexpected sense memory gift that hits a nerve. Darius is reminded of his wife and the fleeting moment of happiness they shared before her depression consumed her. Rob breaks down his defenses and gets the information he’s been seeking: his pig didn’t survive the initial ordeal; the kidnappers were too rough and she’s been dead all along. Rob returns to the woods, crushed and alone. The silver lining is that he’s reconnected with the world, his former self, and what remains of the family he abandoned — including a quiet moment with his estranged daughter — to the point where he’s able to summon the strength to listen to the cassette tape that was too painful to play at the beginning, a gift from his deceased wife, playing Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.”

Pig’s scenes of violence — the stealing of the pig and the culinary fight club, both scenes leaving Rob pounded into the ground — are frontloaded. They’re counterbalanced, and overcome, by two sensuous cooking scenes that bookend the film. The first scene happens in the very beginning of the film and it forges the connection between Rob and his pig. After a successful truffle hunt, he lovingly crafts a quiche with his swine at his side. Filmed in tender slow motion, with romantic natural light filtering through the cabin, he assembles the ingredients, chops and roasts the mushrooms, and rolls out the crust. He lays it over the pan and the flour sprinkles down on the pig’s upturned snout, her grunting in the background. This short, delicate cooking scene is echoed in the final scene at Darius’ mansion atop the city. Rob and Amir prepare pigeon breast, wild chanterelles, and huckleberries, again shot at a speed that draws out the experience, filtered through a golden lens. Pig is about sublimation, supplanting a primitive animal urge — violence, vengeance, bloodlust — with another evolved, intellectualized animal urge — hunger elevated into the sensorial art of cuisine. In Pig, revenge is a gourmet dish.

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